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The James Webb Space Telescope arrived at its new home Monday after traveling nearly a million miles. The arrival of the spacecraft checks for another difficult step as scientists on Earth prepare to spend at least a decade using the observatory to study light far from the beginning of time.
Launched into space on December 25, the telescope has swayed astronomers from all over the world. However, the 10 billion dollar telescope had to complete the first leg of the installation phase. Earlier this month, astronomers gasped when the observatory opened its heat shield and opened up its mirrors and other instruments with a few surprises – a remarkable feat given the telescope’s new design and engineering complexity.
And at around 2:05 p.m. ET on Monday, engineers confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope had successfully reached its final destination.
After a final five-minute firing of the spacecraft’s main thruster, the telescope came to a position beyond the moon and thrust itself into a small pocket of balance where the gravitational forces of the sun and Earth were mixed. From this outpost, called the second Lagrange Point, or L2, the Webb telescope will drift around the sun alongside Earth for years to steadily monitor outer space without spending much fuel to maintain its position.
“We’re one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “And I can’t wait to see Webb’s first new insights into the universe this summer!”
NASA officials talked about what’s next A news conference is scheduled for the spacecraft on the agency’s YouTube channel at 3 PM and at 4 PM, you can listen to it in the player below.
Named after a former NASA administrator who oversaw the formation years of the Apollo program, the James Webb Space Telescope is about seven times more sensitive and three times its size than the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. The sequel to Hubble, Webb was designed to see more into the past than its famous predecessor, 13.7 billion years ago, to study the first stars and galaxies to shine brightly at the dawn of time.
Webb’s Christmas morning launch hits risky high 25 year development timeline It’s fraught with engineering challenges, bugs, and cost overruns that make space travel even more frustrating for astronomers and space agency managers. Tightly wrapped to fit inside a European Ariane rocket, the telescope opened up dozens of mechanical limbs and instruments. These consisted of five layers of thin foil-like plastic stretched the size of a tennis court to shield Webb’s instruments from the heat of the sun. The telescope then revealed an array of 18 gold-plated mirrors 21 feet wide that would help reflect light from the universe onto ultra-sensitive infrared sensors.
The instrument side of the telescope facing away from the sun will be hidden in cold darkness, while the other side, or the outermost layer of the sun shield, will deflect temperatures as hot as 230 degrees Fahrenheit. This helps overcome a major challenge in Webb’s design of keeping the telescope’s sensors cool so that stray heat doesn’t interfere with infrared scans of ancient galaxies, distant black holes, and planets orbiting other stars.
Placing the telescope in the L2 neighborhood helps keep temperatures low while providing enough sunlight for Webb’s electricity-generating solar panels. But the telescope isn’t exactly parked at L2 – it will rotate around the center of the spot to expose the solar arrays to sunlight.
“If we were perfectly there, we’d be blocked by Earth so we couldn’t get our electricity,” said Scott Willoughby, telescope program manager at Northrop Grumman, the observatory’s prime contractor. “So we’re orbiting this halo.”
Placing the spacecraft this far from Earth would also help conserve limited fuel resources.
“If you try to be close, you have to spend fuel to stay there,” said Mr Willoughby. But less fuel is needed to put Webb in the L2, “meaning that this vehicle will have the longest mission life,” he said. A mission official this month suggested that the spacecraft could remain operational for up to 20 years.
With the telescope’s instruments deployed and its arrival at L2 complete, there are many smaller steps ahead before us on Earth can begin to see live images of the cosmos as the spacecraft. Over the next three months, engineers will watch as algorithms help fine-tune the position of Webb’s mirror segments and correct any misalignment – as precisely as one-tenth of a 10,000th of a hair follicle – to allow the 18 hexagonal segments in his array to work. as a single mirror.
Engineers should then calibrate Webb’s scientific instruments, testing its ability to lock onto known objects and track moving targets before astronomers use the telescope for science operations starting this summer.
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